Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators
Cognitive Surplus is a non-fiction novel written by writer and academic Clay Shirky. Summary "Cognitive Surplus" refers to our mental awareness of the abundance of free time we have in the current age and how we use it. Industrialization began to transform society, resulting in much of what people struggled to obtain in the past was now provided with ease. With the free time left over, our focus could either go to fulfilling other needs or to enjoying that free time. "Life in the developed world includes a lot of passive participtation, at work we're office drones, at home we're couch potatoes. The pattern is easy enough to explain by assuming we've wanted to be passive participants more than we wanted other things" (pg 11). The beginning chapters discuss the level with which television began to fill people's free time after the industrial revolution. Quotes "One thing that makes the current age remarkable is that we can now treat free time as a general social asset that can be harnessed for large, communcally created projects, rather than as a set of individual minutes to be whiled away one person at a time" (pg. 10) "...the use of a social technology is much less determined by the tool itself; when we use a network, the most important asset we get is access to one another" (pg. 14) "As long as the assumed purpose of media is to allow ordinary people to consume professionally created material, the proliferation of amateur-created stuff will seem incomprehensible" (pg. 19). "We, collectively, aren't just the source of the surplus; we are also the people designing its use, by our participation and by the things we expect of one another as we wrestle together with our new connectedness" (pg. 29). "Those bits of new behavior are extensions of, rather than replacements for, much older patterns of our lives as social creatures" (pg. 101). "When negative consequences are imposed on a behavior, they will produce a reduction of that particular response" (pg. 113). "What is clear is that the simple application of seemingly fundamental principles isn't actually simple, because principles aren't actually fundamental" (pg. 149). "Couch surfing was set up to change the way people travel. It isn't just about having the free accommodation, but also about making connections worldwide" (pg. 159). "People pay more for beer in a bar than they do at home because it is a more convivial place to have a drink" (pg. 58). "Broadcast media, like telivsion, clearly filled some human needs, but those needs that they couldn't fill well became harder to see and, ultimatley, harder to imagine." pg 88 Central Themes * One of the underlying themes present in the first chapters was television, and how our television viewing experience has changed since the internet has become popular. Think About it? Our society increasingly offers more free time because of advances in technology. One example is in the consumption of television shows. How many hours a week do you spend consuming television shows from when you were 10 to now? * Television shows are now including hashtags in the corner of the screen for viewers to live-tweet as they watch. By adding that feature, networks are basically getting free promotion for their show by using fans as marketing. By shifting from just being a viewer to also being a marketing tool, how has this changed our overall television experience? "Gin consumption was treated as the problem to be solved, when in fact it was a reaction to the real problem - dramatic social change and the inability of older civic models to adapt" (pg 3). * What are some examples of our society trying to solve the reaction to a problem, as opposed to finding the source problem itself? For example, drug and alcohol dependency, discrimination, etc. Lingering Questions from Class What effect has the aggregate of free time across the world had on the distribution of information? Regarding group 2's class discussion, would you really be able to survive with only using one Internet site?